MOVIE REVIEW: Two-days in a troubled marriage exmaimed in 'Le-Week-End'

Friday

Mar 28, 2014 at 3:00 AM

“Le Week-End” is the bittersweet tale of a long-married couple who've traveled to Paris to reignite their long-dormant passion.

By Al AlexanderFor The Patriot Ledger

There’s something about France that inspires belligerence in the British. It’s been going on for centuries and it continues with “Le Week-End,” the bittersweet (emphasis on “bitter”) tale of a long-married Birmingham couple who’ve traveled to Paris to reignite their long-dormant passion. But despite all the romantic trappings the City of Lights offers, the only thing getting stoked are the hostilities and resentment that have festered over 30 years of underachieving weddedness.

Nick (Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent), an English professor, has just been let go for making an innocuous comment about a black student’s hair, and Meg (Lindsay Duncan), a schoolteacher, is coming to the realization she’ll never make headmaster. Their professional failures are nothing compared to their personal ones. He’s mousy and clingy; she’s cold and uncaring. And, predictably, each blames the other for their shared misery. Yet, they fool themselves into believing a long weekend in Paris, the place where they honeymooned 30 years earlier, will be the end-all cure-all. It isn’t, of course. Instead, it merely accentuates their emotional flaws, beginning with their polar-opposite mindsets. Nick, given his forced early retirement, understandably wants to do Paris on the cheap. Meg, unaware that Nick has lost his job, wants to throw caution to the wind by staying in the best hotel, eating at the best restaurants and adopting a sudden hunger for adventure.

Writer Hanif Kureishi, making his fourth collaboration with director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill”), provides his two hugely talented stars plenty of vitriol to unleash on each other. And a good deal of it leaves a mark. But to what end? The combatants are blisteringly real, as are their beefs with each other, and it makes you uncomfortable. It’s as if the filmmakers are stealthily allowing us to eavesdrop on a marriage that’s evolved from bonding to bondage. Kureishi intensifies the squirms with observations that are remarkably astute and indicative of why so many couples in their 50s and 60s opt for divorce after the kids are gone.

And it’s a good bet that it’s the wife seeking the split, as is the case with Meg, who is thoroughly fed up with the humdrum routine of marriage. Still vibrant and beautiful, she longs to be free to pursue life her way and not feel guilty when a much younger Frenchman comes on to her, as is the case when she attends an extravagant dinner party at the plush Paris home of one of Nick’s old cronies. But how can you root for her knowing that her happiness will likely destroy Nick, who says he clings to Meg because he knows no other woman will want him? It all comes to a head during the aforementioned soiree hosted by Jeff Goldblum’s Morgan, one of Nick’s proteges who has become everything Nick is not – a rich, successful author with an opulent home and a barely legal trophy wife. And Goldblum, at the top of his game, proves a master of passive aggressiveness in subtly rubbing those facts into Nick. It strips Nick of his final inkling of dignity, and like a tortured lion he finally finds the courage to roar. It’s an exhilarating moment that finally sparks something other than dread in the viewer. But like a lot of “Le Week-End,” it feels forced and a tad too opportune.

Yet it works, largely because of Michell’s flawless direction and his two incredibly brave actors, who fearlessly take on the roles of two seemingly irredeemable narcissists and remarkably make them likable. Credit some of that to Kureishi, who livens the story with unexpected slivers of humor and adventure.

Still, despite all the film’s assets, it remains a challenge to ticket-buyers who will need to ask themselves if they want to spend 90 minutes hanging with a bickering middle-aged couple.